I was born in Lodz, Poland. After the Germans invaded, my mother sent me and the three younger children, Menashe, Beyrish, and Mendell, to stay with our grandmother in Kozienice. She figured it was a smaller town and that maybe the Germans wouldn’t touch us there. My mother was with us for a short while and then went back to Lodz. I was taking care of the younger children. We had a wealthy uncle who lived nearby who saw what was happening and said that he would help out; he would take the younger children to be with him. He was well off he said and he could protect them if the Germans came. The Germans wound up taking my uncle and my brothers and sister to their deaths, either to Treblinka or Majdanek.
I was alone and stayed in the Kozienice Ghetto. I worked there in the hospital in the ghetto. I had appendicitis, the doctor sent me out of the ghetto to have an operation in a hospital. While I was in the hospital, I heard someone ask if the were still going to evacuate the Jews out of the ghetto. I also heard that all of the Jews in the hospital were going to be killed.
I left that night after having had my appendix removed. I walked and wound up at a barn where I fell asleep. I still had the clamps in me from the operation; my wounds were not sewn up. Much later, a good German Kapo at Skarzysko-Kamienna concentration camp helped me get antiseptic.
The barn it turned out was part of a Nazi slave labor camp, Gorczytski. There was a Selection and I survived it. I was there for seven weeks, digging ditches. We were then sent to Skarzysko-Kamienna concentration camp. I worked in the ammunition factory in the Camp A, separating the good bullets from the bad bullets. I was there for about one year. It was good and it was bad. Camp A was better than the Camp C which was very bad.
The German Kapo we had was very good to us. She helped get me antiseptic to treat my wound from the appendicitis operation. She told us if they tell you to leave the camp, do not go, hide from them. Those who did leave, we heard, were killed on the road.
She was with us at Skarzysko-Kamienna and at Czestochowa. She was wonderful to us. She would bring us non-kosher food, but that I wouldn’t eat.
I was liberated on January 17, 1945 at Czestochowa.
Everything is Beshart, or fate. I went back to Lodz. I met my future husband at the Jewish community center there. I later found out that I had a sister who survived who was in Germany. We went there to be with her.
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